Fantasie und Fuge B-Dur (Die güldne Sonne)

Die güldne Sonne voll Freud und Wonne (The Golden Sun Full of Joy and Delight) is a Christian morning song whose text was written by Paul Gerhardt.
So what could be more fitting than to provide this piece on Monday morning...?
It has twelve stanzas in a verse form that Gerhardt developed in it for the first time. It appeared in 1666 with melody and setting by Johann Georg Ebeling in a collection of Gerhardt's songs. It appears in the Evangelisches Gesangbuch under number 449 and is included in many hymnals and songbooks.

My composition is a good 2 years old, I had already uploaded it once, however a complete revision can be found here. I now let it sound on the beautiful sample set of the St. John organ in Krakow.

Gerhardt's song is structured like a sermon, in twelve stanzas, like the months in the cycle of the year. He used the image of the sun as a symbol of God's love in 25 of his songs, e.g. in the 4th (in EG 3rd) stanza of Ich steh an deiner Krippen hier, in the tradition of the Lutheran theologian Johann Arndt. The song contemplates the sunlight without avoiding shadows and suffering. In the style of baroque poetry, Gerhardt often strings together two similar terms, e.g. "munter und fröhlich" and "Güter und Gaben" (see also Hendiadyoin). The last stanza brings a view of a heavenly garden, "joy the fullness and blessed silence", towards which the author's thoughts are directed.

We have a smaller Fantasia, the climax of which is a pedal solo followed by full organ in the manual, followed by a large-scale 4-part fugue. The finale is a simple chorale movement. Actually, the Fantasia is unplayable due to the very demanding pedal part, but there may be one or two who can manage it ... who knows ....
In any case, I can't manage it and have played the pedal solo on the manual and then put it on channel 3. It's nice that MIDI exists!